#50_Youngjoo Cho by K.NOTe

K.NOTe no.50

Youngjoo Cho

K.NOTe no.50

Youngjoo Cho

Publisher Total Museum Press Pyungchang 32gil 10, Jongno-gu, Seoul Korea (03004) Tel. 82-2-379-7037 total.museum.press@gmail.com Director Jooneui Noh Editor in Chief Nathalie Boseul Shin, Yoon Jeong Koh Coordinator Taeseong Yi Educator Haeun Lee Intern Jisu Hong, Sooeon Jeong Designer Heiin Son Sponsor Arts Council Korea Date of Publication 2018.07 ÂŠ Author and artist The reproduction of the contents of this magazine in whole or in part without written permission if prohibited.

DMG: Demilitarized Goddesses, 8 mins 51 secs, sound, color, Cheorwon, 2015

K.NOTe #50 Deprivation is Ultimately Proof of Being Sera Jung Director of THE STREAM

“One early spring day in March, a woman suffering from deep sadness and lethargy visited me. She said she had been treated by a doctor for aphasia a few months before. She talked about the happy days she had spent with a man--the dates they had had together and the happiness of their lives as they studied abroad together. …The fear of rejection that she experienced as a child fused with a fear of being dumped by the man she loved, causing her a great deal of anxiety. The sadness and anger she felt over what she experienced, as a child and as an adult, as she stood and fought, and as she lapsed into obedience, as her mother before her had done, are reflected in her work. –E xcerpt from an introduction to the 2013 solo exhibition Mild Depressive Episode by Consultant Psychiatrist Kyung Sook Kim The artist Youngjoo Cho once lost her ability to speak as a result of aphasia. Linguistic activity is essential for a human being to recognize himself or herself as an objective entity. The world of universal order created through language and culture is a world, so to speak, of taking interest and forming relationships with the outside world. The experience of losing the ability to speak could be seen as a way of rejecting or escaping the universal order in this world. It is a matter of speech being lost through a psychological state of wishing to escape and negate reality. If one views Cho’s work in terms of these origins and this state of deprivation, its beginnings can be traced to foundations laid during her early 6

DMG: Demilitarized Goddesses, 8 mins 51 secs, sound, color, Cheorwon, 2015

experience studying abroad. Works of art are said to emergence from and through the artist’s actions; in the same way, Cho is the origin of her artwork, and her artwork is her own origin. Cho was forever an outsider during her studies abroad, a minority from the East. Given her life as a woman and outsider, perhaps she had no choice but to devote herself further to herself, proving her own existence through art. The otherized perspective that has appeared in her work to date is also fully present in her early works. This is true of I’m not acceptable(2006-2007), a yearlong photographic series in which she captured and recorded momentary images from her life as someone defined by others, or herself, as an outsider. And it is true of One night with someone’s t-shirt in my bed(2006-2007), a record taken after borrowing and spending the night in T-shirts borrowed from random men. As she sends them back to their owners, the intentionalized situations – such as attempting to organize additional meetings with them – are an attempt to subvert prejudices people come to develop about Asian women in Western societies. The artist uses performances employing the bodies of otherized women, including her own, as a kind of tool for speech. Following her return to Korea, this perspective was carried over into several works. One of these is Universal Collaborators, Seoul(2014). For this piece, Cho hired European or American white males as performers and attended an exhibition opening with them. It is a form of performance, exposing herself to and playing with the gossip that follows a Korean female artist in a relationship with a white man. Cho also includes videos of interviews in which she looks back on the social actions that arise in the process. Rather than trying to interrogate her own femininity, Cho explicitly reveals the contradictions of the social structure, opening new possibilities beyond those of fixed categories. She could be viewed as a feminist in the way she communicates a personal message from the standpoint of an otherized woman. From a premodern perspective, both “Asia” and “women” are categorized as invisible 8

others, a domain of fantasy that also entails a subversive combination of fascination and threat at the boundary between the real and unreal. As a researcher, the first video works by Youngjoo Cho that I encountered were her five-part video dance series – Floral Patterned Romance(2014), Grand Cuties(2015), The Divas go out (2015), Watery Madams (2015) and DMG_Demilitarized Goddesses (2015) – and Talking in a dress (2015). Cho’s series, organized as a research program and a video dance project using middle-aged women as models, shows the artist’s interest in the generation of mothers to today’s younger Koreans, or in women in general. Over the course of roughly a year, Cho met with around 70 women in their fifties and sixties and employed them as models, actors, and performers in her work. The characteristic middle-aged performers are ordinary Korean mothers, members of a group popularly known as ajumma, as well as women referred to then and today as Geunyeo – “she,” or “that woman.” As the leads in Cho’s work, their movements appear somewhat comical and awkward. The reason our observing gaze feels somewhat uncomfortable is because they are not delicate young women, but women representing how our mothers appear – and who are thus recognized as marginal figures, mere ajummas, rather than being spotlighted as protagonists. These ordinary, familiar women are dressed up by the artist in beautiful wedding dresses and flowered one-pieces. One may sport chic clothing; another may have an apron tied out a girlish skirt, with a flashy hat on her head. Like a child dressing up dolls for a role-playing game, Cho dresses the women up and presents them as girlishly cute or beautiful. The important thing in this work is this “dressing-up” process of applying beautiful wedding dresses, cosmetics, and hairstyles to these women hidden behind the name of ajumma. Youngjoo Cho plays the role of mediator, guiding these middle9

aged women known as ajumma in an attempt at a new image, a new self, a new becoming. And by presenting a set of guidelines for behavior, she uses the women to bring the absurdity women experience in society to the surface as a kind of fantasy, something different from the reality they face. In fact, “becoming” something else exists on the existential horizon as an ethical concept. Becoming is an act of practice, cutting across some form of difference. As we see in the differences between black and white, or between male and female, “becoming” is the very act of resistance and creation that penetrates difference when it remains as difference and the relationship of differences becomes entrenched. Deleuze and Guattari proposed that “all becomings are minoritarian,” rejecting the rigidified thinking that viewed masculinity, norms, and majority status as subjective concepts. Instead, they proposed “becoming”– such as becoming female or becoming other. Also very interesting is the observation of the individual actions of the artist’s models once they begin participating in the performance. The women enjoy their new characters, their faces beaming. Despite clearly being connected to the social dimension, the actual society in their performance is erased, enclosed within art, as though being staged in a theater. Only when they appear in special wedding dresses that set them apart from the everyday do these middle-aged women “become” something other than what they are now, reveling in their becoming through differences that separate them from the uniformity of other ajumma. Dressed in their old wedding dressed and flower-print one-pieces, they become beautiful or charming. They may not be in the same shape physically, but for a brief moment they enjoy the situation given to them. Through their performances, the women are transcending a vicarious process of making up for some kind of deficiency in the reality, a situation that confines them to bonds, and discovering a journey toward proof of their own being. As they leave behind their 10

marginalization and become something disparate, their becoming gives them the strength to engage in fluid and creative thinking and action rather than depending on or succumbing to the gazes or perspectives of a controlling majority. The women are said to have wept with disappointment once the project ended. Perhaps those tears were shed for a special self encountered through their liberation from the confines of a depersonalized word, their fleeting moment of becoming something new. The process of conceptualization toward overcoming the ethics of difference established between the entrenchment of homogeneity as ajumma and the homogeneities thus entrenched is duly recorded in the video medium. The artist’s endless “becomings” seem all the more fitting when one considers the nature of the video medium. The formal hallmarks of the moving image achieve legitimacy through this process of conceptualization – for the practice of becoming leads into a process of self-proof, and the video camera is capable of quite vividly capturing the very dynamic self-reflection process of having to go from “state” to “being.”Experiences as momentary, unrepeatable situations, the women’s unfixed images are configured intertextually against the backdrop of random neighborhood settings, container factories, or the Demilitarized Zone. Their journey – their moving – is both a passage through spaces and a rediscovery of seemingly trivial places – the same way in which we are viewing the women. This conceptualization appears more directly in A beautiful match made in heaven(2013). For this work, the artist personally called up and registered with a marriage broker, keeping visual and audio records of the matchmaking process. It is another attempt a new “becoming” through sharing with others a real situation containing a subtle blend of truth and falsehood, adopting a divorced Korean woman in her late thirties as its protagonist. The artist’s aims in revealing the social standing with which she is positioned in the 11

marriage brokerage, and in sharing a fantasy of true love that is not permitted in that world, come across in the consultant’s questions not as fantasy, but as real-world absurdity. It is a dig at a situation where the only important things are height, weight, profession, and annual income – a society where marriage is a mere institution, rather than the fruition of love. The reason the artist has constantly used fantasy in attempts at becoming is because of a process, a journey of reflection for a being to be defined as a being. It is in truth a journey for all of us. We all dream of a different life, a different way of being, the place beyond the fence that defines us now. This shift to a different life outside originates in the desire to be loved by others as a being in the world. The commonality Youngjoo Cho identifies in her ajumma, Eastern women, foreigners, and minorities is that the meaning of words themselves carry with them deprivation. Loss and deprivation lead to fundamental questions about being; their definitions originate in differences from beings. Women, foreigners, and minorities are beings of relative deprivation (difference), yet we forget that this is inevitable. Through the endless process of “becoming” within this long journey, the artist is interrogating how she is at the same time someone’s mother and father, a woman and a man, part of the majority yet also a minority.

DMG: Demilitarized Goddesses, 8 mins 51 secs, sound, color, Cheorwon, 2015

Youngjoo Cho Youngjoo Cho (born 1978 in Seoul) is a conceptual artist working in Seoul, Berlin and Paris. And she has been working in performance, installation, photography, video, sound and dance in the frame of divers exhibitions. She has been interested in the themes of Korean women in Korean society and the irrationalities and inconveniences of social structures. Cho has also been realizing performative projects that utilize children, teenagers, and middle-aged women and deal with gender issues, female identity, and relations between western men and Korean women.

Sera Jung Co-founder and director of the non-profit group Korean Video Art Archive THE STREAM (www.thestream.kr), Sera Jung is also supervising editor for the video art criticism journal of the same name. Jung also writes about all areas of media, culture, and the arts as a member of the editorial committee for the media, culture, and arts journal AliceOn. After completing a graduate degree in fine arts at Hongik University, she received a diploma in arts management from the University of Toronto. Since starting out as curator for a commercial gallery in Seoulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Sogyeok neighborhood, Jung has focused her activities on art theory, visual arts criticism, and exhibition planning. She served as supervising curator for the 8th Juan Media Festival and a member of the Asian video art and experiment film archive review committee for the Asia Culture Center. Her planning efforts include the doors art fair in 2011, the special media art exhibition at the Asia Top Gallery Hotel Art Fair in 2012, and the special media art exhibition By(e) Nature for the 2013 Korea Galleries Art Fair. She currently lectures at Hongik University, Konkuk University, the Seoul Institute of the Arts, and the Pusan National University graduate school. Her major interests include research on Korean video art and public archiving of moving images, along with experimenting with critical extensibility. She has co-authored the works The Great Game (2015) and Media Kit for Changing Daily Life (2016).

Youngjoo Cho

ungjoo Cho